Earthsea He Will Choose and Choose Again

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This story, recommended by librarian Nancy Pearl for fans of Harry Potter, tells the adventures of sorcerer Ged and the difficult tests he must face earlier he tin attempt to re-establish the balance of power in his globe.

Excerpt: Warriors in the Mist

The island of Gont, a single mount that lifts its peak a mile in a higher place the storm-racked Northeast Ocean, is a country famous for wizards. From the towns in its high valleys and the ports on its dark narrow bays many a Gontishman has gone forth to serve the Lords of the Archipelago in their cities every bit wizard or mage, or, looking for take chances, to wander working magic from isle to isle of all Earthsea. Of these some say the greatest, and surely the greatest voyager, was the human called Sparrowhawk, who in his day became both dragonlord and Archmage. His life is told of in the Deed of Ged and in many songs, but this is a tale of the time before his fame, before the songs were made.

He was born in a lonely village chosen Ten Alders, high on the mountain at the caput of the Northward Vale. Below the village the pastures and plow lands of the Vale slope downward level below level towards the body of water, and other towns lie on the bends of the River Ar; above the hamlet only wood rises ridge behind ridge to the rock and snow of the heights.

The name he bore as a child, Duny, was given him by his mother, and that and his life were all she could requite him, for she died before he was a year old. His male parent, the bronze-smith of the hamlet, was a grim unspeaking human, and since Duny's 6 brothers were older than he by many years and went one by one from home to farm the country or sail the sea or work every bit smith in other towns of the Northward Vale, in that location was no one to bring the child up in tenderness. He grew wild, a thriving weed, a tall, quick boy, loud and proud and full of temper. With the few other children of the village he herded goats on the steep meadows higher up the river-springs; and when he was potent enough to push and pull the long bellows-sleeves, his father made him piece of work equally smith'southward boy, at a high toll in blows and whippings. In that location was non much piece of work to be got out of Duny. He was ever off and abroad; roaming deep in the forest, pond in the pools of the River Ar that like all Gontish rivers runs very quick and cold, or climbing by cliff and scarp to the heights above the wood, from which he could see the sea, that broad northern ocean where, by Perregal, no islands are.

A sister of his dead female parent lived in the village. She had washed what was needful for him as a baby, merely she had business of her own and once he could look after himself at all she paid no more mind to him. Simply one day when the boy was vii years erstwhile, untaught and knowing aught of the arts and powers that are in the earth, he heard his aunt crying out words to a goat which had jumped up onto the thatch of a hut and would not come up down: but it came jumping when she cried a sure rhyme to information technology. Next twenty-four hours herding the longhaired goats on the meadows of High Fall, Duny shouted to them the words he had heard, not knowing their use or significant or what kind of words they were:

Noth hierth malk homo

hiolk han merth han!

He yelled the rhyme aloud, and the goats came to him. They came very quickly, all of them together, non making any sound. They looked at him out of the dark slot in their yellowish optics.

Duny laughed and shouted it out once again, the rhyme that gave him power over the goats. They came closer, crowding and pushing round him. All at once he felt agape of their thick, ridged horns and their strange eyes and their strange silence. He tried to get gratuitous of them and to run abroad. The goats ran with him keeping in a knot effectually him, and then they came charging down into the village at final, all the goats going huddled together equally if a rope were pulled tight round them, and the boy in the midst of them weeping and bellowing. Villagers ran from their houses to swear at the goats and laugh at the male child. Among them came the boy's aunt, who did not express joy. She said a discussion to the goats, and the beasts began to squeal and browse and wander, freed from the spell.

"Come with me," she said to Duny.

She took him into her hut where she lived solitary. She let no child enter at that place normally, and the children feared the place. It was depression and dusky, windowless, fragrant with herbs that hung drying from the crosspole of the roof, mint and moly and thyme, yarrow and rushwash and paramal, kingsfoil, clovenfoot, tansy and bay. At that place his aunt sat crosslegged past the firepit, and looking sidelong at the male child through the tangles of her black hair she asked him what he had said to the goats, and if he knew what the rhyme was. When she constitute that he knew zip, and even so had spellbound the goats to come to him and follow him, then she saw that he must have in him the makings of power.

As her sis's son he had been nada to her, just now she looked at him with a new eye. She praised him, and told him she might teach him rhymes he would like improve, such equally the word that makes a snail look out of its shell, or the name that calls a falcon downwardly from the sky.

"Yeah, teach me that proper name!" he said, being clear over the fright the goats had given him, and puffed up with her praise of his cleverness.

The witch said to him, "You will not ever tell that give-and-take to the other children, if I teach it to you."

"I promise."

She smiled at his set up ignorance. "Well and good. But I will bind your hope. Your tongue will be stilled until I choose to unbind information technology, and even then, though you can speak, you volition not be able to speak the word I teach you lot where some other person can hear it. We must keep the secrets of our arts and crafts."

"Good," said the boy, for he had no wish to tell the clandestine to his playmates, liking to know and do what they knew not and could not.

He sat still while his aunt spring back her uncombed hair, and knotted the belt of her clothes, and again saturday cross-legged throwing handfuls of leaves into the firepit, and so that a smoke spread and filled the darkness of the hut. She began to sing. Her phonation changed sometimes to low or high as if another voice sang through her, and the singing went on and on until the boy did not know if he waked or slept, and all the while the witch'south old black dog that never barked sat past him with eyes red from the smoke. Then the witch spoke to Duny in a natural language he did not empathise, and made him say with her certain rhymes and words until the enchantment came on him and held him still.

"Speak!" she said to test the spell.

The boy could not speak, just he laughed.

And then his aunt was a little agape of his force, for this was equally strong a spell as she knew how to weave: she had tried not just to proceeds command of his speech and silence, but to demark him at the aforementioned fourth dimension to her service in the craft of sorcery. Yet even every bit the spell bound him, he had laughed. She said nothing. She threw articulate h2o on the fire till the fume cleared abroad, and gave the boy water to drink, and when the air was clear and he could speak over again she taught him the true name of the falcon, to which the falcon must come.

This was Duny's first pace on the manner he was to follow all his life, the mode of magery, the way that led him at last to hunt a shadow over land and sea to the lightless coasts of expiry's kingdom. Merely in those first steps along the way, information technology seemed a broad, vivid road.

When he found that the wild falcons stooped down to him from the wind when he summoned them by name, lighting with a thunder of wings on his wrist similar the hunting-birds of a prince, then he hungered to know more than such names and came to his aunt begging to larn the proper name of the sparrowhawk and the osprey and the hawkeye. To earn the words of power he did all the witch asked of him and learned of her all she taught, though not all of it was pleasant to exercise or know. There is a maxim on Gont, Weak every bit woman's magic, and there is another maxim, Wicked as woman's magic. At present the witch of X Alders was no black sorceress, nor did she always meddle with the loftier arts or traffic with Old Powers; merely being an ignorant woman among ignorant folk, she frequently used her crafts to foolish and dubious ends. She knew zip of the Balance and the Blueprint which the truthful wizard knows and serves, and which go along him from using his spells unless real demand demands. She had a spell for every circumstance, and was forever weaving charms. Much of her lore was mere rubbish and braggadocio, nor did she know the true spells from the simulated. She knew many curses, and was better at causing sickness, perhaps, than at curing it. Like any village witch she could brew up a dear-potion, simply at that place were other, uglier brews she fabricated to serve men's jealousy and hate. Such practices, however, she kept from her young prentice, and equally far as she was able she taught him honest craft.

At first all his pleasure in the art-magic was, childlike, the power it gave him over bird and beast, and the knowledge of these. And indeed that pleasure stayed with him all his life. Seeing him in the high pastures often with a bird of casualty about him, the other children called him Sparrowhawk, and so he came past the name that he kept in later life as his employ-proper noun, when his true-proper name was not known.

Equally the witch kept talking of the glory and the riches and the great power over men that a sorcerer could gain, he set himself to learn more useful lore. He was very quick at it. The witch praised him and the children of the village began to fear him, and he himself was sure that very soon he would go great amidst men. So he went on from word to word and from spell to spell with the witch till he was twelve years old and had learned from her a nifty part of what she knew: non much, but plenty for the witchwife of a small village, and more than than enough for a boy of twelve. She had taught him all her lore in herbals and healing, and all she knew of the crafts of finding, binding, mending, unsealing and revealing. What she knew of chanters' tales and the neat Deeds she had sung him, and all the words of the True Speech that she had learned from the sorcerer that taught her, she taught over again to Duny. And from weatherworkers and wandering jugglers who went from town to town of the N Vale and the East Forest he had learned various tricks and pleasantries, spells of Illusion. It was with one of these light spells that he get-go proved the slap-up ability that was in him.

In those days the Kargad Empire was strong. Those are four smashing lands that prevarication between the Northern and the Eastern Reaches: Karego-At, Atuan, Hur-at-Hur, Atnini. The tongue they speak there is not similar any spoken in the Archipelago or the other Reaches, and they are a cruel people, white-skinned, yellow-haired, and fierce, liking the sight of claret and the olfactory property of burning towns. Terminal year they had attacked the Torikles and the strong island Torheven, raiding in bang-up force in fleets of red-sailed ships. News of this came north to Gont, but the Lords of Gont were decorated with their piracy and paid small mind to the woes of other lands. Then Spevy cruel to the Kargs and was looted and laid waste, its people taken as slaves, and so that even now information technology is an isle of ruins. In lust of conquest the Kargs sailed next to Gont, coming in a host, thirty not bad longships, to East Port. They fought through that town, took it, burned it; leaving their ships under guard at the mouth of the River Ar they went up the Vale wrecking and looting, slaughtering cattle and men. Every bit they went they split into bands, and each of these bands plundered where it chose. Fugitives brought warning to the villages of the heights. Soon the people of X Alders saw fume darken the eastern sky, and that dark those who climbed the High Fall looked downwards on the Vale all hazed and red-streaked with fires where fields set up for harvest had been set up ablaze, and orchards burned, the fruit roasting on the blazing boughs, and barns and farmhouses smoldered in ruin.

Some of the villagers fled up the ravines and hid in the forest, and some made ready to fight for their lives, and some did neither but stood about lamenting. The witch was one who fled, hiding lonely in a cave upward on the Kapperding Scarp and sealing the cave-oral fissure with spells. Duny's male parent the bronze-smith was one who stayed, for he would not leave his smelting-pit and forge where he had worked for 50 years. All that night he labored chirapsia upwardly what ready metallic he had there into spearpoints, and others worked with him bounden these to the handles of hoes and rakes, at that place beingness no time to make sockets and shaft them properly. There had been no weapons in the village but hunting bows and short knives, for the mountain folk of Gont are non warlike; it is not warriors they are famous for, only goat-thieves, sea-pirates, and wizards.

With sunrise came a thick white fog, as on many fall mornings in the heights of the island. Among their huts and houses down the straggling street of Ten Alders the villagers stood waiting with their hunting bows and new-forged spears, not knowing whether the Kargs might be far off or very near, all silent, all peering into the fog that hid shapes and distances and dangers from their eyes.

With them was Duny. He had worked all night at the forge-bellows, pushing and pulling the two long sleeves of goathide that fed the fire with a blast of air. Now his artillery then ached and trembled from that work that he could not hold out the spear he had chosen. He did not come across how he could fight or be of any proficient to himself or the villagers. Information technology rankled at his heart that he should dice, spitted on a Kargish lance, while still a male child: that he should go into the dark land without e'er having known his own proper noun, his true name every bit a man. He looked down at his thin arms, moisture with common cold fog-dew, and raged at his weakness, for he knew his strength. There was power in him, if he knew how to use it, and he sought among all the spells he knew for some device that might give him and his companions an reward, or at to the lowest degree a risk. Just need alone is non enough to set ability free: in that location must exist knowledge.

Excerpted from A Wizard of Earthsea past Ursula Chiliad. Le Guin Copyright © 2004 by Ursula Grand. Le Guin . Excerpted past permission of Spectra, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No role of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Source: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4704490

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